


Falling Down a Rabbit Hole

by anonymonster



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nico-centric, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-20 21:39:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4803125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymonster/pseuds/anonymonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Nico makes the final jump to Camp Half-Blood, he feels a curious sort of relief that has nothing to do with the knowledge that the journey he started when he entered Tartarus is over. But then, predictably, everything goes horribly wrong - more wrong than it's ever gone before. And Nico's journey? Well, he seems to have taken a wrong turn on his way home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. falling for forever

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after Heroes of Olympus, but riffs off the ending - Nico's emotional issues seemed very neatly resolved with a sudden new friend/implied love interest, and his confession to Percy and Annabeth, but I personally don't think he would have gone quite that easily and it felt to me like he was caught in the post-battle atmosphere. The kid's got deeper-set issues that he needs to work through before he can feel like a decent human being.

When Nico makes the final jump to Camp Half-Blood, delivering an army of Romans and interrupting the latest group of monsters’ leading charge, he feels a curious sort of relief that has nothing to do with the knowledge that the trip he started when he entered Tartarus is over. He feels like maybe he’s happy to see these people that he vaguely recognizes, and like maybe, in light of what he’s brought, they will be happy to see him, too. He smiles as best as he can given the circumstances, but it probably comes off a little wan.

Then he heroically passes out and doesn’t wake up for three whole days. In his defense, he had to really hop to it with the whole travelling-thousands-of-miles-with-like-forty-people thing, and he hasn’t felt anything even approaching okay since the nearly four-hundred mile jump across the Sierra Nevadas and Death Valley. Nico had also passed out that time, only in the parking lot of a lake observatory and after vomiting up everything he had eaten in the two days previous along with what _felt_ like a gallon of blood and possibly half an intestine. This was then promptly followed by a short seizure and an overwhelming gratitude towards Reyna upon awakening for stuffing ambrosia down his throat despite the fact that apparently, when all your muscles are spasming, it includes the ones that have control over your bladder.

Nico had really wished that the fate of hundreds of demigods wasn’t resting on his shoulders at that point, because he could remember few times in his life that he had felt more humiliated and was considering that maybe enough was enough for one lifetime. But Reyna just clapped him on his shoulder and said that she’d had to hold people down through worse. The whole experience was verging on becoming what might pass for a heart-to-heart if you were an emotionally repressed Roman and a kid whose friends mostly consisted of the dead and the forgotten, but then the local sea monster population decided to remind them where they were. Nico spent the next thirty minutes dodging acid blood and struggling not to faint again while Reyna and her soldiers slashed at a lake serpent rivalling the Athena Parthenos in height.

This time, it seems, Nico’s condition is not deemed sufficiently life-threatening for enough ambrosia to heal him to consciousness and he has completely missed the negotiations, the victory of the Seven (plus Reyna), and the beginning of the “Yay, we’re not dead!” celebration. As a result, everyone is at the party when he finally opens his eyes. Nico isn’t sure who is supposed to be watching him ( _if anyone cares enough to_ , comes a whisper from the corner of his mind, which he shakes off because there’s at least _one_ person who cares enough to help him even when he’s half dead and frothing at the mouth), but the room is silent save for the noises coming from the party and, when he flips away the white sheet that had been covering his face, looks like it was hastily abandoned in favor of the revelry filtering in from outside.

He closes his eyes again and groanes. Music is thumping loudly enough to hear fairly clearly from his bunk, which isn’t helping his splitting headache. He’s never gotten drunk before but he imagines that this is what a hangover might feel like. He also feels too light, hollow, almost airy - he’s felt similarly before, on the occasions he’s forgotten to eat for more than two days at a time and ended up lightheaded from the hunger, and more fearfully back when sunlight still filtered through his fingers. His powers have never been quite the same after he overexerted himself transporting the Athena Parthenos - there is always that little bit more emptiness after he shadow travels, that little bit less power every time he summons the undead.

He doesn’t know what happened after he lost consciousness, but he takes a moment to hope it was less embarrassing than last time before swinging his feet over to the floor to take stock of the situation.

For some reason, he’s still in his tattered clothes from the desperate attempt to get Reyna and her centurions to Camp Halfblood - new yet already tatty jacket, shoes, sword, everything, which is kind of weird, careless, and maybe a little upsetting. Despite the wool lining of the bomber jacket, Nico shivers. It’s always cold in the Hades cabin. He’s not sure how to feel about this place, because while he’s sure that when he designed it he had good intentions and it’s a step up from the Underworld and airless bronze jars, it’s kind of gloomy. He is responsible for that, but when he did the interior decorating he was also like thirteen and Nico kind of wishes somebody had stopped him, or at least pointed out that he was going to have to live here for extended periods of time.

Which actually doesn’t matter, because he’s leaving anyway. Nico promised, to himself and Jason, that once they closed the Doors of Death he would leave forever. Then it turned out he was needed to get the Athena Parthenos to Camp Half-Blood to stop a Greco-Roman war, then he got press-ganged into a quest, then a class to teach, then another threat against the world, and at some point he realized that he was just - being. Part of the camps. And now he’s here. Alone in the Hades cabin while everyone else celebrates their victory - his victory, they couldn’t have done it without him. He could go outside, and people would thank him like last time, and - No. Nobody is paying attention and nobody would find out that he’s gone until too late.

_There’s no reason not to maybe take a risk that I’m really your friend and I’ll accept you._

Nico scowls to distract from the sudden feeling of having swallowed a large knot. Jason had no idea what he was talking about. He’s strong, well-liked, a leader, and even has a girl he loves who loves him back. Jason Grace has no clue what it would take for people to accept Nico, and the reality is that it is way more than Nico could ever offer.

_It’s better than hiding._

Something familiar and hot starts to curl painfully in Nico’s chest, and the shadows cling to him despite the moonlight spilling across the bed. Better than hiding? How is being forced to admit that he’s even more of a freak than everyone already thought better than hiding? If Nico let people find out that he’s… like _that_ … He doesn’t need to give people any more reasons to side-eye him.

_Maybe it’s time you come out of the shadows._

Nico’s heart thumps somewhere in the vicinity of his throat and he defiantly takes a step towards his way out, one of the dark corners of the cabin - and a scream rips through his throat as what feels like liquid fire tears through his upper arm.

He whirls around to see what hit him, but the cabin is completely devoid of life (har, har). Nico’s sword arm feels like it’s been stabbed clean through between his armpit and shoulder, and hot blood is trailing down from the wound. The ground has started trembling and cracking open in a few places, and someone is shouting nearby.

Nico’s not actually paying attention to any of that.

Mostly, he’s just staring at the body laying on the cot.

 _His_  body.


	2. wonderfully wandering alone

Nico feels like some giant hand has closed over him and _squeezed_. He can’t move, even though the pain in his shoulder is getting ready for round two of the get-Nico-to-keel-over game and he can see something silvery sticking out of the wound in the bottom corner of his vision. He’s finding it difficult to breathe, and everything spins for a second until his vision focuses on his corpse (definitely a corpse, it’s not breathing, there’s no heartbeat, he can _feel_ that it is dead), laying pallid and bloodless on the single Hades cabin cot. The white sheet he woke up under is bunched up to the side of the body where he threw it, and everything is… clean, strangely sterile. Despite the pain pulsing through his left side there is no visible injury to his - to _the body’s_ shoulder. It’s wearing the same things he is, but they look like they’ve been washed, and lay slightly awkwardly on his frame. Somebody else dressed him. If the situation was any different, that might be embarrassing.

He wonders, a little hysterically, if he could take the body’s sword and dual wield Stygian iron, but then there is a loud crack and somebody lands right next to him, yelling words that Nico can’t parse at right that moment.

The shock of the movement breaks his stupor, and he flails away from whoever attacked him, flinching back into the dark corner he had been approaching and drawing his sword. Except when he tries to slash at his attacker, he slices straight through Reyna.

Nico feels like he’s been punched in the throat for a moment because there’s no way that he just disemboweled Reyna, of all people - but the blade somehow passed through her intangibly and she is unhurt. Unhurt, and approaching him slowly with her hands raised in the universal symbol of peace. Nico’s eyes dart to the side, and he can see that there are people starting to crowd in the door, though it’s too dark to make out who they are. The floor of the cabin has fractured, opening fissures Reyna must have leapt over to get to him, and the place resembles an earthquake aftermath more than anywhere livable.

He must have done that, but he feels nowhere near exhausted enough for a show of power like that. Shaky, sure, and a little out of it (er, literally), but cracking the ground open to this degree is generally not something he can do without a noticeable expenditure of energy. Especially not after the month he’s had. He feels like he’s buzzing, ready to take on the world.

He absently realizes the party music is no longer playing.

“Nico,” Reyna intones firmly, recapturing his attention, “put down your sword.”

That’s a fair request, as he did just attempt to murder her. He can do that. His grip around the hilt is white-knuckled ( _how is blood flowing through his hands here if his corpse is right across the room?_ ) and the sword tip has dipped down towards the ground, shaking wildly as his arm refuses to hold it up through the pain lancing through his shoulder. He pries his fingers off one by one, rationalizing that Reyna can probably explain what’s happened. Reyna’s always got the situation under control even “the situation” looks like they get to choose between drowning in the Bermuda and getting eaten. Nico ends up dropping the sword with a startling clatter.

He had forgotten for a second that that would happen if he let go of it. Which is. Obvious. And silly.

Nico puts his hands over his face and breathes in a single stuttering breath. Then realizes that he hadn’t been breathing for the past few minutes during his freak out and struggles to not… something. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, can’t focus. Needs to focus.

Reyna.

Nico counts to ten like people do in movies when they are having a hard time not flipping out (too late) and peeks at Reyna through his fingers to see her approaching again, having dispersed the crowd and shut the door. She brushes her hand over the wall by the door as she walks past, flicking on a lamp someone had brought in at some point. Probably before he woke up. Then again, it’s not like Nico would have noticed someone bringing in a lamp while he brandished his sword at his friend like a lunatic.

Reyna stops a couple of feet away from him and hesitates for a moment, unsure, but then visibly makes a decision and strides forward. She brings her hand up to pat him on the uninjured shoulder.

Her fingers move through him, and they both gasp a little at the profoundly uncomfortable sensation. Nico wonders what it felt like when his sword went through her guts, and feels a little weird about the thought. It feels like a petty thing to be wondering about, given the circumstances. On the other hand, he’s kind of afraid of what she has to say, and doesn’t feel quite up to vocalizing anything at the moment.

They both stand there for a moment, Nico staring at Reyna through parted fingers and Reyna with one hand still hovering awkwardly by his shoulder. When she pulls it away, mist-like wisps of him trail after her from Nico’s shoulder, the disturbingness of which is compounded by the way he can feel it happening.

Then Nico’s knees give out and he slumps to the floor, hands flying out to catch himself and landing on the hilt of his sword. Reyna barks out a laugh and flings her hands up to cover her mouth. Nico suddenly feels less weird for wondering about the sensation of ghostly evisceration.

She sits down next to him and leans back against the wall, watching as Nico hunches forward and fumbles to sheath the sword with fingers that misbehave and refuse to go where he wants them to. “So that was an interesting welcome back to the land of the waking. You alright?”

It’s Nico’s turn to sputter with laughter, though the sound he produces is less genuinely amused and more tilted towards hysterical. “Reyna, I’m. I’m pretty sure that I’m dead. Consider my position of general authority on dead things, and tell me what that probably means.“

“Still looks like it hurts,” she shrugs, gesturing toward his shoulder, which is true. He avoids looking directly at the wound, a nervous feeling feathering at the edge of his mind when he catches sight of the the silvery flash winking a warning light in the corner of his vision. He’s not sure why catching it in his sight fills him with trepidation, but he’s resigned himself to dealing with one problem at a time.

"Yeah,” he concedes, finally sheathing the sword, then turning to look at her face, “Yeah, no, Reyna, what in _Hades?_ ”

She grimaces, fiddling with the tail end of her braid as she figures out what to say. It’s a nervous habit he’s seen her lapse into before, on the occasions when they had a chance to stop fleeing from monsters and inevitably had to say things other than “Look out!” and “You distract it and I’ll go around!” to each other. Coach Hedge, in all his over-excitably bloodthirsty glory, is remarkably not actually much of a conversationalist (which is not to say that he doesn’t talk much). She ends up going with, “We’re not actually sure. I mean… we figured you might know. Like you said, you seem to have experience in a lot of relevant things we don’t know much about.”

Ouch. Point to Reyna. He probably shouldn’t have told her about the pomegranate seeds. Nico makes a mental note to invoke her full name sometime soon and stares at her helplessly. Reyna takes pity on him.

“You’ve been here for three days,” she tells him, “and you were in really bad shape when you got here, and we couldn’t safely give you any more ambrosia after how much you had during the trip. Nico, your _heart stopped_ when you passed out! For a minute, you were _dead!_ How could you not tell me about how badly off you were?”

Reyna looks like she’s about to hit Nico, which would be kind of flattering in a weird way, since it’s obviously out of concern, but Nico feels sick. Truth be told, he hasn’t had a good grasp on his own limits for a while now, and now Reyna is obviously blaming herself for not keeping track of something he should have been extra sure to communicate clearly about. Coach Hedge, too, probably. He could have jeopardized the entire mission, and people - _Reyna's_ people - would have been killed because of him. Materialized halfway into a mountain, or in the air, or, or - or not materialized at all.

Lately, things always turn out so wrong when he tries to help lately, and now people are stuck worrying about him because he has once again proven beyond doubt that he needs someone to mind him. He was supposed to be done with gods and heroes - the plan he'd outline for himself was deliver a stupid army to save Camp Half-Blood, save the day, and then get on with his life! Find a place where nobody knew him as that Hades kid (like he can even blame his weirdness on that anymore - Hazel’s doing fine making friends now, it’s just _Nico’s_ charming personality that freaks people out), maybe try to finish high school, and just… be okay. And if he's been making the same plan for himself previous to every mission he's gone on since he, Reyna, and Coach Hedge delivered the Athena Parthenos, then that's his business.

That’s all he wants. Just a shot at something other than the scraping misery of surviving day to day.

It’s been something difficult for him to achieve since Bianca died. Which sounds completely cliche, he knows, it’s been years and even if she was his only family until he met Hazel, it’s not like his life revolved around her when she was alive. They took care of each other, sure - someone had to. But she had her friends and he had his own separate interests. She never even played Mythomagic. It makes no sense that he can’t even look at his old cards anymore without being overcome by dread.

And he did try. He helped out, and things were looking up. Up and up until he upped himself into Tartarus and, well. Nico once told himself that it made sense, that what goes up must come down, but if he decides to be truthful with himself, he would admit that that's total bull. Other people have managed to achieve a modicum of happiness in their lives without horrifying consequences. He’s pretty sure it’s just his own fault that everything he touches turns to dust between his fingers.

And now Nico’s particular brand of deficiency has finally culminated and he’s _dead._

At least it’s him. At least it isn’t Reyna or Jason or Hazel or any of the hundreds of others that he nearly doomed to war.

Reyna sighs, distracting Nico from his thousand-yard stare at the floor, and puts her hand on the floor, fingers right by his.

“Hazel says your, um, soul has been fighting its way out of your body since day one,” she tells him, and forces a slight smile. “And I guess it’s finally succeeded.”

“What does that even _mean?_ ” Nico croaks.

Reyna shrugs. “My area of expertise is keeping your insides inside of you, not your soul. But don’t worry. Annabeth and Hazel are figuring it out. It’ll be fine. In the meanwhile, you could join the party? Everybody’s been feeling a little off celebrating while you’re stuck in here, so it’s the first chance anyone has had to wind down. Anyways, it’ll be good to relax a bit before tackling the next problem - the camps are pretty wrecked, and we still have a battalion of Romans in Camp Half-Blood with no way home.”

That is surprisingly considerate, and Nico hates himself a little bit for the resentment he feels at everyone enjoying themselves with him on his literal death bed. Reyna’s method of jumping right over every emotional pitfall that Nico can’t help but to get caught in and boiling everything down to a problem to be solved is… reassuring. He’s not sure if he believes her, but he at least feels less like the world is collapsing around his ears. Since he nearly made his surroundings literally collapse around his ears earlier, Nico decides this is a good thing.

Nico heaves himself up, nearly overshooting when he overcompensates for weight he does not currently possess (and that’s curious - he kind of wants to find out more about his current state, but the desire is overshadowed by the way he also wants to curl up under a blanket and never ever leave), and turns to Reyna. Keeping his hand at his side despite the impulse to give her a boost up, he says, “Yeah, well, why not. I’ll hide in a corner bleeding ectoplasm on the tables and you can tell me about how you guys saved the day - uh, you guys won, right?”

“No, Nico,” Reyna deadpans, “we did not. In fact, when you go outside, you’ll realize that we are now a single small island of temporary safety left in a world that is burning to the ground.”

It’s frightening how little difference there is between Reyna’s sarcastic and deadly serious tones, considering that it wouldn’t be entirely out of the question that such a thing had come to pass. The slight smile tugging at her lips gives her away, though, and he returns it cautiously. Nico’s not entirely used to smiling at people these days (what stark contrast to a few years ago - Bianca took a lot of things to her grave, he supposes), but it’s a nice feeling to fall back into.

Reyna flings open the cabin door and he trails along behind her, following the faint sound of music starting up again.

By the time they reach the celebration, Nico has remembered that he is absolutely not a party person. It is, however, too late to renege, and he doesn’t want to keep Reyna away watching to make sure he doesn’t accidentally send the Hades cabin underground.

The music has been cranked up and playing full-swing, but more people seem to be milling around in small groups than taking part in anything that could be classified as revelry, unwilling to separate from the friends they very nearly lost. There is a general atmosphere that strikes Nico as raw, and his shoulder pulses more intensely in response to it.

Reyna shoots a surreptitious look at it, furrowing her brow, and Nico stares straight ahead. She opens her mouth to say something, but someone shouts Nico’s name before she can get words out, and they turn to look at the party.

Hazel waves her arms to catch their attention before pushing back from the table she was seated at and jogging over to meet them. A few people trail behind her, though Nico can’t make out who they might be through the mass of hair suddenly in his face as Hazel throws her arms around him in a hug - one over his good shoulder, and the other carefully under his ribs in a diagonal hug that doesn’t jostle his ghostly injury.

“Hey, Nico,” she greets him softly, less energetic than he might expect, “I’m glad to see you up.”

Nico spits out a lock of curly hair and cautiously winds his arms around Hazel. Reyna is staring at him, puzzled, and he decides to just bury his face into Hazel’s hug and ignore everything else for a few seconds, nodding. He feels a little bit like he’s melting into her embrace and it’s embarrassing enough that he hopes she doesn’t let go until he’s sure that he won’t wobble after her. If the celebration’s atmosphere feels raw, then Nico is downright wounded. His shoulder aches in time with the beat of his dead heart.

“I’m glad you’re alright,” Nico tells Hazel, and she responds by sniffing loudly. Well, okay, at least he’s not the only one about to turn up the waterworks.

People are talking in quiet tones next to them, and after another few seconds someone walks up and -

Nico flinches, flailing out of Hazel’s hold. When he looks back, Jason has retracted his hand to his chest from where he tried to clasp Nico’s shoulder, little pale rivulets snaking from Nico’s jacket to Jason’s fingers.

“Don’t-” Nico tries, “Don’t do that.”

Hazel is a little wide-eyed, and goes to try to touch the fading wisps of soul. Instead of passing through, her fingers manage to brush them aside as if they are ribbons, suspended in the air. A few seconds later, they’re gone.

“Well,” says Leo loudly from the miniature crowd of familiar faces that Reyna is, once again, keeping back, “Good to see that dying has not impeded our resident Hades kid’s ability to completely creep everyone out.”

Hazel rolls her eyes, but the comment works well enough to dissolve the tension running through everyone, and Jason, Hazel, and Nico make their way back to the rest of the group.

Just before they get there, Jason lets Hazel move ahead and waves a hand in front of Nico to get his attention.

“I’m sorry.”

It doesn’t feel like he’s just apologizing for poking Nico’s soul, but while Nico often befriends the lonely and neglected, he has never been able to read people like Jason.

Nico nods, looking down, and they walk on.

When Reyna brings her arm down, effectively releasing the floodgates, everyone swarms around Nico. There are too many voices competing for him to make out what everyone is saying, but he gets the gist of it when some kid he’s seen lined up with the second cohort tells Nico he’s awesome and one of the newer Aphrodite girls that follows Piper around adds that she totally digs his style.

Nico is taken aback at the reception, though he knows he probably shouldn’t be. Everyone here has proven to be as kind as circumstances allow, and he did just more or less die for a heroic cause. He’s probably got at least a week of welcome saved up from that before people start remembering they don’t actually like him all that much. Probably less before he remembers that he doesn’t actually like the pressure of being around people all that much.

Though it is nice he is treated this way. It’s sending little warm curls through his chest, like when Percy and the others came to rescue him from the jar and only slightly less tinted by desperate relief, that drown out the pain lancing through his shoulder. It feels like Hazel’s hug all over again, a little melty and a little right. It’s also more than a little overwhelming, and Nico backs up until he’s in danger of walking into Jason again.

Jason’s smirking at Nico, and Nico is starting to get the impression that Reyna wasn’t entirely truthful back in the cabin, because other than Jason’s momentary mistake, nobody has tried to touch him. Not one of the campers clamoring to get their word in is questioning his current state, though Leo made it clear that it’s common enough knowledge that Nico is not alive at the moment.

Just… unabating adulation. Unabating adulation, and Hazel running to hug him, and Jason trying to pat him on the shoulder, and everyone else being so careful not to touch Nico.

Nico turns to Jason. “What’s going on?”

Jason smiles, but not before his expression flickers to something troubled for a split second. Then he tells Nico, “People are glad you’re up. We all thought you were dead.”

Nico shakes his head. “No. No, you’re… okay, I’ll buy that, but come _on_. This isn’t…"

He can’t articulate that he finds something wrong, and people are starting to calm down and look at him weird as he scrabbles for words. The sudden panic that he’s blown it already lurches in his stomach when Reyna peers carefully at him from the corner of her eye, hard enough that it actually nearly causes Nico to double over. He hears something crack, and someone flinches, but everyone else is nonreactive. Deliberately?

Jason shakes his head, looking concerned. “Nothing’s wrong, Nico. Annabeth’s on it, it’ll work out.”

“Don’t _lie_ to me!” Nico shouts, and then slaps a hand over his mouth because he didn’t mean to scream. This has escalated so quickly, and he doesn't understand why or how. Jason steps back, and Nico suddenly catches something silver flashing in the corner of his eye that sends terror shooting down his spine. He slips through the opening Jason left in the wall of people and runs.


	3. what would my head be like if not for my shoulders

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a homophobic slur in this chapter, just in Nico's own head.

When Nico di Angelo is fifteen years old, he comes to a realization.

It’s really dramatic, at least in his head, and _almost_ dramatic in real life, but in a bad way. It has no relation to what he’s doing at the moment he has it, because life isn’t always fitting like that. He’s in the middle of helping Hazel fight off _empousa_ (and who knows what they’re doing attacking a Roman camp - since the defeat of Gaia and the other assorted big bads, the various monsters out for demigod blood have become more disorganized than ever) because, prophecy of seven and child of the Big Three or not, she still sometimes pulls guard duty.

Nico’s got a bit of a complex involving sisters, which he was starting to get over a bit until he fell into Tartarus and then got stuck in a bronze jar for six days, so he helps her out. Just in case.

It’s the last vampire of the group that they’re fighting when Nico has his revelation, and he stutters a little in the middle of his swing. The _empousa_ uses the moment to deflect his blade and jab at his side, but Hazel is swinging wildly with a bar of what looks like cursed gold. She gets the monster right in the soft part of her skull, and she evaporates all over Nico’s face immediately.

When Hazel asks what was up with him just then, he’s too busy spitting and coughing up monster dust to reply. By the time he’s done with that, she’s laughing at him, the little incident is forgotten, and he sends her off to report the attack to Reyna (and if he’s not willing to let her stay out there herself even after she just saved him, well, that’s nothing to do with _her_.)

As soon as he’s alone, his thoughts are pulled around and back like oil drops between magnets. The metaphor brings to mind Annabeth, who has taken it up to try to give him something like an actual education instead of just what he’d learned in between ditching classes to play Mythomagic in boarding school, so that he can transfer into a high school next year and actually get the diploma most life paths require. Sometimes he starts thinking about what’s been discovered and achieved during the time he was in the Lotus Casino and wonders if the entire world could pass him by in a haze of playing cards. Maybe if Percy and Annabeth hadn’t gotten them out of there, one day he would have gone outside to find himself a relic of an older species - one that had evolved and expanded an empire across the stars. But then his mind is back to Annabeth and he thinks, _I don’t have a crush on her._

This isn’t news to him, but the thought does bear expanding on. Thankfully, it’s also not news to _everyone_ else - he confessed to Annabeth and Percy, sure, but given the circumstance they deserved to know, and hell if anybody else does. For a while, he was petrified that he was going to wake up one morning and everyone in camp would know that Nico di Angelo is a faggot, but it’s yet to happen and he appreciates Percy and Annabeth for it.

He did once think he had a crush on Annabeth, because there was no other way to explain the way he felt around her. He saw her hair down once when he was ten. It was blonde and long like a princess’s, and something wound tighter and tighter in the pit of his stomach, until he felt sick. He told Bianca, one of the last things he confessed, and she ran a familiar hand along the nape of his neck and giggled mysteriously. The movies always said that weird feelings around girls meant you were in love, and he believed them. Annabeth was older than even Bianca, a daughter of wisdom with a dagger between her teeth. That’s the kind of girl that’s made for falling in love with.

But there was Percy, too, and it didn’t take long for Nico to figure out that whatever he felt around Annabeth, he felt around Percy - except warmer and even tighter in his belly. It felt nicer, but nobody had ever told him that he could like boys so he decided that he was jealous. It made sense - Percy was a hero. He was Mythomagic brought to life swinging a sword, one of the big kids but nice, the one who saved him, the one who protected Bianca up until he was the one who came up to Nico and said, I tried.

I _tried._

And it was a while before Nico figured it out, yes, but when Percy kept _trying_ and his feelings towards Annabeth curdled sour and the warmth in his belly spread and he half-remembered a vicious whisper from church that he hadn’t _quite_ understood yet, he thought -

\- Well, he thought a lot of things.

But mostly it all went back to a crush on Percy, even as Percy crushed Nico’s throat with his sword and Nico’s hackles went higher around him than even Annabeth.

Eleven is a confusing age. So is twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen, too. Now he’s fifteen and he thinks maybe he’s a little less confused and also that maybe it was easier when he was still wondering. Which is saying something, considering.

Because he’s been watching Annabeth and Percy, you see, since they came back from Tartarus. They’re so in love that is hurts to watch, stinging sharp somewhere raw behind his eyes that makes him look down and shuffle his feet and twist his ring every time they kiss.

They kiss like they’re drowning, which is silly because Percy can breathe underwater. In fact, if what Nico hears is true, they have actually kissed underwater, and it was Very Romantic (™). Percy clutches at Annabeth’s cheeks with a lack of gentleness that you don’t see in movies (you can probably tell by now that television was - is - a prime feature during Nico’s formative years). She, in turn, threads her fingers through the short strands of his hair and pulls hard enough that sometimes Percy winces, and they press together until the phrase “leave room for Jesus” flashes through Nico’s mind and he has to press his sleeve to his mouth to hide a smile even as his heart twangs like an out of tune piano string.

It’s not just in their kisses, though. They move like two parts of a whole and even when they’re not looking at each other they are still touching. The back of a hand against a wrist, a nose against a shoulder blade. Sometimes they finish each other’s sentences and when there is nobody around they stop speaking with words and turn to gestures and expressions. Whatever it was that Nico lost when he fell into Tartarus, they found for each other.

He wants that, he has just realized. He wants it, wants to be a piece of someone’s puzzle so badly that it tugs on his bones until they don’t fit right anymore unless he’s watching them. He’s stopped sleeping because his dreams make him so happy that he ends up in tears and there’s nothing worse than waking up to reality. Long gone are the dreams of having a crush (you know the ones - and they are, by the way, infinitely more embarrassing and frightening when you are from the 30s and the closest thing you’ve had to a parental figure was a girl who ran away to die when you were ten).

He falls into the shadows before Hazel can come back, an echo of guilt for leaving the gate unguarded following him down, and eats pomegranate seeds in the underworld because the dead don’t sleep. Two days later, he’s called upon to deliver an army across the country on a forty-eight hour timer, to be a hero, and he hasn’t really slept in the time between - and three and a half days later, he’s dead. At least he beat the deadline, he thinks.

Nico hides in the forest. He only really intends to stay for a little while, until he can unscramble his thoughts and figure out what just happened, but he can hear the cracking of feet on branches following him, so he runs and runs and runs until he’s calmed down and whoever bothered pursuing him runs out of breath. At some point, he splashes through the river and his insubstantial form is nearly swept away - the panic that spikes through him for a split second is sudden and all-consuming, and the riverbank cracks around him without his control until he can grab a gouge of fresh earth to pull himself out.

The water slips through him sluggishly as he walks, as though he’s fluid himself, and the sensation is unsettling. The little drips in the soil are the only sign he leaves of having passed - he’s no longer heavy enough to indent footprints, and he’s way too creeped out by the way that things sort of pass _into_ him for a few centimeters to allow himself to brush against any branches or plants. He’s vaguely concerned about what it is about the earth that’s preventing him from passing through - what if he hits a patch that’s less solid and ends up in the center of the planet?

Eventually, he passes through the other side of the forest and finds himself hanging his legs off the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. It’s past dusk, the sun long-gone, and it looks like he’s hanging on a precipice over some dark void. Over Tartarus.

Nico lays down on his belly, and hangs an arm down over the edge, imagining. Eventually, the wound in his shoulder aches too much to keep bearing and he unnerves himself, so he sits up, pulls his legs up, and crosses them.

He doesn’t understand what happened back at camp, exactly, or why he’s suddenly so terrified of everything, but he’s sure of a couple things: Reyna and Jason were lying to him about what’s going on, and everyone but him is in on it. Now that he’s had a minute (or sixty, or maybe more - he doesn’t actually know how long he’s been walking through the woods) to chill out and think, he can acknowledge to himself that they were probably looking out for him. He’s just - he overreacted. And now everybody’s probably wondering why they even bothered trying to help an ingrate, and when he comes back the congratulation and jubilation will be gone. It’s going to be even worse than before, because this time he’s going to know that they were faking it before, and they’re going to resent him for - for everything that just happened.

Nico’s glad that most of the damage was confined to his cabin - and suddenly Nico is unsure if that’s true, if someone really _had_ bothered to follow him or if it was just him, leaving a trail of cracked and deadened earth through the forest. Maybe the dryads and nymphs are going to resent him now, too.

He’s upset again, and it’s starting to show in the ground around him. The shadows are pulling towards his seat, pooling under him, and he hasn’t had this little control over what’s happening around him since he was eleven. Maybe ever. It’s scary, and the fear is cyclically making it worse.

Nico stares at the encroaching darkness, willing it to dissipate, but if anything that just speeds up the process. Soon, he’s a translucent figure in his own little pool of void, and the only thing he’s accomplished is being more frustrated than upset.

“Nico!”

Nico freezes. The cry is faint in the distance, and he can’t tell who’s doing the shouting. A girl, maybe? It seems like someone _was_ following him, just at less inhuman resting intervals.

“Nico!”

Louder, now. He hesitates for a minute, and calls back cautiously.

“Over here!”

There’s silence for a moment, and suddenly he can hear someone stomping through the underbrush with determination, making their way through the trees at the edge of the woods until he can see Annabeth picking bits of twig out of her ponytail.

“Nico,” she says for the third time, more exasperated now than worried, “Nico, everyone’s been looking for you since Reyna told me what happened. We thought you’d disappeared yourself or something and were _really_ dead this time.”

He doesn’t know exactly how to reply to that. “I _am_ really dead.”

She shakes her head, raining the last of the twigs to the ground, and sits down next to him. He tries not to read into the way she won’t hang her legs off the edge, either.

“Not really, actually. Your body’s dead, but you haven’t gone to the Underworld because it’s not your time yet.”

Nico knows that, actually. He can feel it. He just doesn’t know what to make of it.

“You weren’t supposed to die, you just - separated. We’ve been reading, and it’s happened before, to other children of Hades, and sometimes Pluto. Usually on accident. You’re supposed to be able to get back, but you’ve been stuck like this for a day, and when you can’t...” Annabeth hesitates for a long moment. “... It’s because you’ve been shadow traveling so much. It’s what happens when your soul rejects your body.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nico asks, voice dull. Her hair looks grey in the nighttime, like she aged decades in Tartarus instead of escaping without even the single old streak from holding up the world to mark the outside damage. (That’s a lie - there’s plenty to mark the damage if someone knows where to look. Her eyes are more hollow, her smiles are more edged, and she has silvery slivers of scars. Nico watches people, and he notices these things about her, and about Percy, and about everyone who lost in the war. Sometimes, he even remembers what _he_ used to look like.)

Annabeth gives him a look that he can’t read, and he’s getting really incredibly tired of this. “Just _tell_ me, Annabeth, I’m not gonna break.”

She whispers her next words, as though she’s afraid that speaking them any louder really will shatter him. “It’s what happens when you don’t want to be you anymore.”

With such a dramatic delivery, he can’t help but bark a laugh. “Annabeth, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve been shadow traveling since I was eleven and I haven’t wanted to be me since I was ten.”

“This is serious!”

“You think I’m _not_ being serious?!” Now he’s digging his fingers into the dirt again, willing the jagged spikes of hot anger to stay inside of him. There’s one crack, a small fissure trailing away from his left hand, but he can’t afford to let this earth break when it’s holding him and Annabeth over fifty feet of nothing and choppy waves. A sudden gust of cold sea wind blows his hair back out of his face, and the smell of salt centers him. “Who would ever want to be me?”

Annabeth reaches out towards him, then thinks better of it and drags the hand through her hair. “Well, it has to be better than being _dead_ , Nico.”

He’s silent for too long after that, because she pauses, and leans precariously into his line of sight. “It… is better than being dead, right?”

“I - yeah, of course.” He’s not… _that_ far gone, Nico doesn’t think. “I’ve never…”

“Yeah,” Annabeth is quick to agree, “Yeah, of course not. But, if you ever - I know I’m probably not your favorite person, but you can talk to me, okay? If you ever need to.”

Nico nods, not trusting his voice to stay steady. He’s leaned forward again until his hair slid back down to cover his face. He doesn’t know if he could ever take Annabeth up on her offer, even if she doesn’t quite mean it, but the fact that she would bother to - that’s one more person that cares enough about him to go out of her way to help him deal with his embarrassing issues. And Annabeth doesn’t even have a reason to _like_ him.

“Now come on, Mister Doom and Gloom,” she makes as if to pat him on the back, and raises her hand awkwardly at the last second, looking sheepish. “Walk back with me and I’ll catch you up on everything you missed. This time _without_ the complementary earthquake.”

Spirits don’t have blood, but Nico manages to go flush in the face regardless.

“Thanks, Annabeth,” he croaks, and stands up.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading what is essentially a fic version of my dire need for exposition on Nico di Angelo and his stupid, stupid feelings.
> 
> Work and chapter titles from C'Mon, by Panic! At the Disco. Tags/pairings may change.


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